Galaxy Forge - Beginners Guide

Sins of a Solar Empire is an incredibly robust RT4X strategy game that allows you to grow your empire and conquer the galaxy. Games can last hours, weeks or even months. To start you off, Sins comes with dozens of pre-built maps, 3 sizes of randomized maps and a sophisticated in-game map generator that lets you define virtually every aspect of a map. Set your preferred planets, stars, distances etc and have the game automatically generate a map based on your choices. You can even share and distribute the map to friends, either via the Sins of a Solar Empire site, or directly in online multiplayer matches.

Unfortunately, the in-game designer doesn't give you complete control. You can't choose, for example, where you want a planet to be placed, or what you want it to connect to. You can't set how many militia forces are stationed there, or whether or not it's a homeworld, or if it's a pirate base. If you want to hand-craft your map, the in-game tools won't meet your needs.

Galaxy Forge is the answer to that problem. Part of the Forge Tools suite used by Ironclad Games to develop content for Sins of a Solar Empire, Galaxy Forge is a map editor tool that allows you to place stars, planets, travel lanes and more. You can build a map to your exact specifications. Do you want a multistar map with strategic choke points and no pirate base? No problem, just create it in Galaxy Forge and load it in the game. Galaxy Forge is a WYSIWYG editor, so placing planets, phase lanes, stars and more is as easy as a few clicks of the mouse.

While Galaxy Forge is incredibly easy to use for the amount of control it gives you, it's not fully an end-user-friendly tool. So, to get everyone up to speed as quickly as possible creating great maps to share with the community, I've created this short guide to building a complete map from start to finish..

WARNING: The editor has no undo feature, so be careful when you move elements or make any changes. Save early and often to make sure you don't accidentally delete something you've spent hours tweaking and customizing.

Getting Started with Galaxy Forge

Galaxy Forge is a stand-alone tool that does not use the main game to run. So you can install this on virtually any machine, even that old Pentium III you have stashed in the closet.

To start, make sure you have the Galaxy Forge tool downloaded to your PC. You can get a copy of the tools from the Sins of a Solar Empire website on the Downloads Page.

Once you've downloaded and extracted the tool, open up Galaxy Forge.exe. You will be greeted by the following screen (pictured right). When you start the Galaxy Forge tool, you begin with a default map already setup with the following:

One Star set to random color

Two terran home planets

Two default players (NewPlayer0 and NewPlayer1)

Before you get started adding planets, phase lanes and more stars, you probably want to decide if this is going to be a 2,4,6,8 or 10 player map.

To modify the number of players in your game, go to the Edit menu and select "Players..."

That will open up the Player editor tool. On a new map, you already have NewPlayer0 and NewPlayer1. Even if you want to make a two player map, you'll probably still want to edit the names of the players. Select a player from the left, and all of their editable options will appear in the box on the right.

For this simple guide, we'll focus on the following options:

Design Name - Name your race. This will be how the race is referenced in the editor only.

InGameName - The name of the race as displayed in-game if it belongs to the AI

StartingCredits - How many credits the player starts the game with.

StartingCrystal - How much crystal the player starts the game with.

StartingMetal - How much metal the player starts the game with.

I am going to stick with a simple two player map, and name the first player "Alcari Crusaders" and the second player "Vor Syndicate" and I'll leave them both with the default starting resources.

Naming Your Map & Filling in The Details

Now that you have a new map with your starting players setup, lets start to configure the big-picture details for the map. Click somewhere in the black space of the map to bring up the galaxy details in the settings panel on the right. This is where you'll make some default changes about your map and how the editor works. Defaults These are basic settings for new planets, players and stars that are added to the map.

New Planet Type - The default planet type for any new planet you add to the map.

New Player Starting Credits/Metal/Crystal - The starting resources assigned when you add a new player to the map.

New Star Radius - The radius of any new star system added to the map

I'm going to leave these as my defaults for this tutorial map. Display The options for how the map is displayed in the map selection screen within Sins of a Solar Empire.

Browse Description - Description of your map. Put a line or two about the map, lore etc. This is the creative description players will read in the map browser.

Browse Picture - The icon associated with your designed map in the map browser. This image should be a .tga file and placed in the Textures directory where you installed Sins of a Solar Empire.

For my tutorial map, I'm going to use the description "An example map created to go along with the Galaxy Forge guide"

For Browse Picture, I'm going to be lazy and just take one of the existing scenario images and reuse that. In this case I'll use: ScenarioPicture-Fulcrum (found in \Textures\ScenarioPicture-Fulcrum.tga)

Edit

These are settings to edit how the editor works with scrolling and zooming and shows your current zoom level. These settings will not impact the map itself.

Galaxy

These are some overall game settings for your map. They will impact how the game plays.

Is First Capital Ship Free - Sets whether or not the first capital ship is free for players to purchase.

Planet Artifact Density - Value 0-100. Controls what percentage of planets will have artifacts on them.

Planet Bonus Density - Value 0-100. Controls what percentage of planets will have bonuses on them

Players - How many players have been added to the map (this number is based off of the Player editor)

Recommended Players - Set what kind of game(s) the map is best suited for (i.e. solo, 2v2, 4v4, FFA etc.)

Scale - Controls how big the galaxy is. Large values will spread out your galaxy more.

To set the Recommended Players, click on the field, and you'll see a [...] button on the right. Click on that to bring up the Galaxy Scenario Game Type window.

By default, this is empty. Click "Add" and a new game type will be added. By default it's set to "Solo". However, if you select the item from the left, on the right you can change the type from a drop-down menu.

You can add multiple types if you have a large map you feel would work well for multiple configurations of players. A map designed for 10 players for example could be set for Solo, FFA, 5v5, 2v2v2v2v2 to fill all spots.

For the tutorial map, I think I'll leave the first capital ship as free, but bump up the % of planets with artifacts from the default 15 to 50 (I want this to be a rich map), but I'll leave the bonus density alone. I'm also going to designate my map as a solo only map since it's just two players.

Home Planet

These are the default settings for any planet you designate as a homeworld in your game. Setting any of these to 10 locks it, preventing the player from upgrading it further.

Exploration - How much of the planet has been explored. You explore planets to discover artifacts and planet bonuses.

Infrastructure - How much infrastructure the planet starts with. Building this up helps defend your planet against bombardment

Logistical - How much logistical infrastructure the planet starts with. Logistics limit the number of orbital structures you can place around a planet.

Population - How much population support your planet starts with. This limits how many people can live on a planet.

Tactical - How much tactical infrastructure your planet starts with. This limits the number of defense placements you can build around a planet.

For the tutorial map, I'm going to leave these alone. Ok, we have successfully configured all the meta details for our map. We've set description, picture, game type and messed with the distribution of artifacts. Now that all of the fluff details are out of the way, it's time to get down to the business of making the map!

Making the Map: Adding Planets, Stars and Phase Lanes

Ok, now for the fun part, actually drawing out the game map! For this part you'll be focusing almost exclusively on the map window, instead of the details window like the previous section. Here you'll place, move and connect up all the planets and stars you want to add to your map.

To start, lets look at our map as it stands

We have one star, two home worlds on opposite ends of the system, and that's it. There isn't even a phase lane connecting anything so if you loaded this map right now, you wouldn't be able to travel anywhere. The planets were auto-assigned to the two players we edited earlier.

Before we get started editing the map, there are a few controls that will make life much easier when trying to move around the map:

Panning The Map - Hold the middle mouse button and drag in any direction.

Zooming in and out - Scroll Wheel. When zooming in, it will center on wherever your mouse cursor is.

Now that that's out of the way, lets add a planet! There are two ways to do this:

Double-click anywhere within the radius of the star

Right-click anywhere within the radius of the star and select "Add Planet"

The planet added will have the default settings you defined when you were tweaking the overall map settings. So for this tutorial, it will auto-place a Terran planet.

I'm going to place a handful of planets around the map....

So now that I have all of my planets laid out approximately where I want them, it's time to connect them all together. To do this, right click on any planet, select "Add Connection" and then left click on the planet you want to connect with. Now let me connect up all of my planets...

At this point I have a fully functional game map. I could save this, load it up in the game and play it, but it would be a little bit boring considering all I have are Terran type planets, no pirates and just one other player to fight.

Editing Planets, Stars & Making Things Interesting

Every planet object on my map right now are terran planets with nothing special about them. We also have a star with the color set to random. Oh, and we haven't named a single planet, the star, or anything. Sure it's a technically complete map, but it just doesn't feel right. Here's a snapshot of the map loaded in the game:

The game will automatically name planets and stars you don't name, so technically you don't have to worry about that detail, but there's a lot more you probably want to tweak and fiddle with.

First off, having a few dozen Terran planets just doesn't look right. This is space, and habitable M class worlds are supposed to be rare right? Well, lets change things up a bit. To start with, we'll select the planet directly below the Vor Syndicate's home world.

For editing the planet, you're going to be focusing on the details panel again.

Advanced

SpawnProbability - The chance that a planet exists in the game. 1 means always, 0 means never. You can set the value between the two for a % chance.

StartingUpgradeForArtifact - Controls what level of artifact upgrade the planet starts with

UseDefaultTemplate - Do you want to use the predefined planet template for this planet? This just gives you the standard structures and resources if it's an owned world, or if it's an empty planet occupied by militia.

Misc

Position - The X,Y coordinates of the planet on your map. Only edit these if you want very precise planet placement.

Name

Design Name - The name of the planet as displayed in the Galaxy Forge

InGame Name - What you want the planet to be named in the game.

Ownership

IsHomePlanet - Is this a homeworld?

Owner - Which player owns the planet at the start of the game.

Properties

Type - What type of planet do you want this to be? Terran, Ice, Gas Giant etc.

For a quick-and-dirty map, the only field you really have to play with is "Type" in the properties section. From there you can select any standard planet type programmed into the game. I will now go around my map, changing up the planet types to give me a slightly more interesting map to play on.

I now have a map with volcanic, ice, desert and terran planets. Various asteroids, Plasma & Magentic Storms, even a Pirate Base. This map pretty much covers everything and if you want to just do the basics to build a map that is playable with default settings, you're done. Just save the file and hand it out to your friends, or upload it to the Sins of a Solar Empire website for everyone to download.

There's a lot more under the covers that you can play with and tweak, but this guide was just meant to get your feet wet and familiarize you with the basic, bare-minimum steps needed to make a map.

And always remember you can open any map that comes with the game in Galaxy Forge to see exactly how Ironclad built each of the maps, what special options they used etc. It's perfectly alright to borrow heavily from great maps when you're trying to figure out how to get a planet to start with a specific artifact, or to give players a quick start by giving them a handful of ships to start out with.

Like with every mod tool, there are a handful of "gotchas" or places that aren't quite clear enough. As people encounter problems/ask for help, we'll update this FAQ section with questions and answers we think everyone should know about when using the Galaxy Forge.

I tried to load the map in my game, but I immediately get a victory/defeat screen after loading. What's going on?Make sure you save the galaxy file in the Galaxy folder wherever you installed Sins of a Solar Empire (i.e. c:\Program Files\Stardock Games\Sins of a Solar Empire\Galaxy). Do NOT save it in your local settings/app data directory. Maps created with Galaxy forge will not load properly from that folder.

Oh okay, thanks a lot for the assisst The last thing I wanted to do is get all excited about making a map only to not place it in the proper location. A slight off topic question, what's this Karma function about?

Karma is just like a thank you cookie for helping or posting useful info to others. If you thought that someone answered your question with good useful info then you can click the thumbs up button (beside report) when you hover over the persons post.

Making this map is beyond fun, a little tedious with all the planet naming but a tool really worth having. I give it 10/10 and 5 stars. I cannot wait to play it, see how it goes. If it's a success, I'll check back here on how to share it with others.

It appears that even though I designed my map correctly, when I tried to play it, not only was I spawned at the wrong location, certain phase lanes weren't being shown. Add to that, I ran this using the Sins of a Galactic Empire mod for Entrenchment, and I couldn't even be the CIS like I chose nor is my opponent the Republic. What went wrong? I was afraid of this happening and I know the map is in the right place.(atleast I thought it was).

I was not looking for a mod, just a file or whatever i need to make new planets in GF, will give your link a look....thanks

Thanks just what i was looking for....

0k i need some help...i want to make my own map with GF, im looking to add new planets and have them show up in game..... I cant remember how i did it in the past.... what all do i need to add to GF and the game...(Diplomacy) I some how got the new planets to show up in SF but when i load map the new types dont show up in game.

thejian, just place the map in the user space galaxyforge folder (and if the map uses planets from a particular mod start the expansion you want AND ENABLE the mod), then play the map, and here is the standard advice for placing the maps

assuming you have sins 1.193/entrenchment 1.053/diplomacy 1.34, the galaxy forge maps NEED to be placed here for xp

these paths assume that your windows installation is on the C: drive and the user space(xp documents and settings,vista/7 users is also on the C: drive, just substitute the drive letter for your fully qualified path to your documents folder)

for sins 1.15/entrenchment 1.00 and earlier, the correct location IS the program files \galaxy folder, and you also NEED to edit the entrenchment's galaxy.manifest to include the maps and also the total count of maps

NOTE the first two folders after the 'user name' are hidden , so to see them you must first click on 'tools' then 'folder options', then 'view', then click on 'show hidden files& folders' then click ok, then you will be able to browse your want to the folder. I suggest when you find the folder that you create a shortcut to it on the desktop

also the galaxy forge maps in the local apps galaxyforge folder only show up in the galaxy forge tab of map types in sins 1.16+/entrenchment 1.02+

if the map IS a galaxy forge and giving the instant win/loss screen then MAKE sure that EACH player has a home planet and is not for a particular mod that has extra home planets and stars

if the galaxy forge map is placed in the program files galaxy folder, then the map NEEDS to be manually added to the entrenchment & diplomacy galaxy.manifests(not recommended as EACH update will replace any files that are different or have been changed)

there is a second type of map which SHOULD be placed in the mapdesigner folder, you can tell if it is by the eighth line reads randomizeStartingPositions TRUE', if this line is FALSE then it is a galaxyforge map and could be in an older map format. the current map format version is 3 this can be seen in line two of the file. if the map is a version 0,1 or 2 then the map updater will make it playable in current versions and expansions

the differences between map versions0,1 & 2 were only the addition of ONE line near the start of the file, BUT mapversion3 has 5 new lines PER PLANET/player & template and 5 changed lines per planet/player & template and WILL CAUSE THE minidump/freeze curse if you just change the version number.

How do i build a GF map with the planets from dolynicks SG planets i have the mod enabled and it works great

(just to clarify)I am not trying to make my own just use the ones that are in the mod

I am running Diplomacy 1.34 i just dont know how to use the planets already in mods thanks

I saw this post while searching and i tried it no change in GF

Go to the folder that contains the mod i.e. C:\Users\YourName\AppData\Local\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire then go to the GameInfo and copy and paste the GalaxyScenarioDef.galaxyScenarioDef into the GalaxyForge folder. As for the Premade fleet for players, you'd have to modify the same GalaxyScenarioDef file, specifically the planetItemsTemplate.

Like the post said, copy the GSD file from the mod's GameInfo folder and replace the one in the galaxy forge with it. When you run the forge, you will have all of the options that the SG mod has planet selection wise... You won't however have any icons for those planets. But fortunately that doesn't matter as those are just there to help you see what the map looks like a little easier. The game will recognize everything at load up and all will be good.

Ok I have not been able to read all of the posts and the search function has not helped much. I have seen many of the maps in the download area but they seem to only work with Sin's and not with Entrench or Diplomacy. The converter does not seem to work. Can someone give me a hand on how to get the maps to work and how to make maps for Entrench and Diplomacy with Forge if it is possible.

this is a horrible question and considering I've played with this before but it has been a long time. how do i get the map to load in the game. I created it, i saved it to the sins galaxy directory and it's not showing up in any of the map selections. i forget how i did it about 2 years ago, but it would be helpful if someone would point out what I'm doing wrong.

this is a horrible question and considering I've played with this before but it has been a long time. how do i get the map to load in the game. I created it, i saved it to the sins galaxy directory and it's not showing up in any of the map selections. i forget how i did it about 2 years ago, but it would be helpful if someone would point out what I'm doing wrong.

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stant123 is quoting the correct info, the location for the galaxyforge maps changed with sins 1.16/entrenchment 1.01 which also introduced the mapversion3 and quickstart.

assuming you are using the current sins/entrenchment/diplomacy(trinity) version, then due to the galaxy.manifest being used for the maps in the small/medium/large lists only, and the mapdesigner maps hiding in the mapdesigner folder next to the mods folders and the galaxyforge maps hiding in the galaxyforge folder also next to the mods folders.

You'll need a mod that has an ocean planet in it. And in that case you're better off copying the GalaxyScenarioDef file from the mod's GameInfo folder, and pasting it in the GalaxyForge folder, replacing the one that is there. All planets in the mod will then be in the drop down list, which might prevent problems if they used a different name.

I hate to ask what is a dumb question at this point but my map isn't appearing on the Galaxy Forge map listing.

The first thing I assumed of course was that I had copied the map to the wrong location, I'm a newbie and it's my first map so that wouldn't be a surprise. I used the Galaxy Forge release dated Feb 2009.

I have the Trinity edition (1.34) via Steam with Diplomacy and Entrenchment. I've tried copying the map file name 1st map ever.galaxy into these 3 locations.

C:\Games\Steam\steamapps\common\sins of a solar empire trinity\Galaxy

C:\Games\Steam\steamapps\common\sins of a solar empire trinity\Diplomacy\Galaxy

C:\Games\Steam\steamapps\common\sins of a solar empire trinity\Entrenchment\Galaxy

Why wouldn't the map be listed? Am I looking in the wrong spot for it (I click Single Player, then Change Maps until I reach the Galaxy Forge listing which is empty).